Spanning more than 20 years, these essays record changes not only in the natural environment of Cape Cod but in the writer's own life. Death of a Hornet is one man's elegant rendering of Cape Cod, a sandy, scrub-oaked, tough, and vulnerable spit of land reaching out into the Atlantic Ocean. These stories are "natural adventures" that Finch's previous readers have come to expect, as well as longer meditations on the future of the Cape's fragile environment, on living in one place for a long time, and on the limitations of human sympathy.